Days
by Eiruiel
Summary: As the final remnant of an extinct clan lies on her deathbed, Uchiha Madara and Senju Hashirama reflect on the time they spent with their friend Asuna. / part three: yesterday, middle part
1. today (zenpen)

**Published: 4/4/2016**

* * *

今日 (前編)

today (zenpen)

* * *

On my deathbed, I think about my past, and about what might have been. It is what I do; I have always lived my life looking backwards, filling my head with thoughts of realities that never have and never will come to pass. I think about choices, both mine and others', and about what consequences they have not wrought.

I think, and I think, and I think, and Hashirama sits at my side, shoulders round with defeat. He cannot save me. He has tried everything—herbs, teas, medicine, ninjutsu—and he has failed, resoundingly. I am still ill and I am still dying, and there is nothing he can do about it. But even so, he refuses to leave. For two nights now he has been sitting here, and though he laughs and jokes with me as he always has, in the moments between his face is expression enough. When he thinks I am sleeping, I can hear him weeping quite bitterly.

And what bitter tears they are. He has grown to such incredible wisdom over the years, to a sagacity that has long since dwarfed my own, but when Mito comes in and catches him crying, he can only repeat to her, over and over, angry and childlike words: "It's not fair."

Perhaps it is not. We have spent about a decade of peace here in this village of our making, but ten years of precious time together still does not seem like enough. It had been the great desire of our childhoods, after all, to have this time together; after tasting its realization, how could anyone watch a cherished dream slip away without thinking it an injustice? But still, I am not so indignant. My time has been borrowed since the very start. I have been cheating death for my entire life; thirty-four years, really, is not an insubstantial haul.

"Madara," Hashirama says through his teeth, jaw clenched and hands fisted. "He should be here. How can he not be here? He's…" he swallows, unable to finish his sentence. "...He should be here," he repeats instead.

I feel my lips twist wryly. The touch of death gives me cold, clear insight.

"You're projecting guilt, Hashirama," I tell him, though not unkindly. Hashirama wilts all the same.

"It's just…" he stares down at his knees, fingers clenched. For a long time, he is unable to speak. But then finally, with a voice that fears answer, he asks me, "Are you going to die with regrets, Asuna?"

He does not speak the second half of his inquiry: _Will it be my fault?_

I think my reply might mean more to him than it does to me. But I suppose that, too, is understandable.

"I'll tell you when I die, Hashirama," I laugh. Though it is a weak and sickly laugh, even to my ears, it is a laugh all the same. The creases in Hashirama's face are deep, but they ease just a bit, and the long shadows cast on him by the evening sun lighten.

Though the time is inevitably approaching, it is not here yet—at the very least, it is not today. So together, we wait, and my final sunsets are spent pondering the yesterdays gone by and the tomorrows that will soon cease to come.


	2. yesterday (zenpen)

**Published: 4/19/2016**

* * *

昨日 (前編)

yesterday (zenpen)

* * *

Before Izuna, Touba had been the last of Madara's brothers to die. Like he had all the other times, Madara went down to the river, replaying the memories before time could grip them and make their edges fade. It had already been three years since Atsuya had been killed, and there were days when Madara could no longer remember his face without fuzz around the edges; it would not be long, he knew, until the same became true for Touba.

It was there that he met Asuna. For a long while, he hadn't realized she'd been watching—she had always been good at hiding, even back then—but when he did realize she was there, he had not felt entirely alarmed. Not as alarmed as he should have felt, anyway, at realizing someone had been lurking behind the tree line and spying on him while he brooded. The grief, he fancied, had just numbed him that much.

And besides that, she was not a particularly threatening figure. Her straw hat was too big, for one, and it made her look small; he could hardly see her face from under its shadow. (It was a man's hat; the hat of her late father, he had learned later on.) And though she had a quiver full of arrows and a bow on her back and a heavy walking staff in hand, she was dressed so overwhelmingly like a girl that it didn't seem to matter. Not like a kunoichi, but like a girl—the kind of civilian girl who wore a pink yukata with a yellow obi and had unravelling straw sandals on dusty, travel-worn feet.

"Who are you?" Madara asked. She had been silent for a long moment, and Madara, in turn, had thought that perhaps she wouldn't speak. But then she lifted her head and he, for the first time, caught sight of a pair of shadowed brown eyes.

"Momiji Asuna," she said.

The way that she had given her family name so freely to him only solidified the impression of _not-ninja_ Madara felt when he looked at her. After all, no shinobi who loved her life would ever give away her clan name to a stranger.

That, he would also come to realize, said a lot about what sort person Asuna had been back then.

"...I'm Madara," Madara said after a moment. He waited for her to prompt him for a surname, but she was quiet. Then she stepped out from behind the tree, set down her pack, and went to stand at the river's edge with him, unarmed.

"Hi, Madara," she said, pushing her hat back. Her hair, he discovered then, was gloriously long; and though it was somewhat mussed, it was also straight and shiny and half of it was held up in a bun by a carved wooden hairpin. It had a handmade look to it, and Madara idly wondered if perhaps she was a merchant's daughter, peddling handmade wares like that. The sack she had been carrying over her shoulder was certainly large enough to be a peddler's bag.

Her coloring was quite Uchiha-like. If he thought back with honesty, he would say that he found the look of her pleasing from the very start. She resembled his mother with that long, black hair— not that he remembered much of his mother. But he did recall her hair. It had been like hers.

But even though Asuna looked very much like an Uchiha girl, she was also different. She lacked the flinty sharpness that defined the kunoichi of his clan. Something about her was softer, and nicer, and more peaceful—the kind of peaceful that shinobi of that era, male or female, never really knew. It was the kind of peaceful look that only those who had had quiet childhoods could wear. No one who had been raised like Madara had, at least, could make the kind of face she made for him then; not for a stranger, anyway. It only strengthened the notion that he was speaking with a civilian girl.

It made him friendly. He had been friendlier more easily and more often in those days. He was able to begin talking with her right then and there, though he couldn't quite remember what about, and it had been nice. There was no need to act like Uchiha Tajima's son in front of her; there was no need to put up an aloof front, or to worry if any of his father's rivals were listening. And Asuna, it turned out, was quite ready to listen to him. He was actually the first person she had spoken to in nearly two years. (When they were older, Asuna confided in him that that day had actually been the end of what she called her Great Solitude. She had, she told him, from the time she was eleven to the time she was thirteen, spent the days in utter isolation. The only person she ever spoke to in all the intervening time was a single wandering monk who had gotten lost while travelling through the mountains.)

The sky was darkening by the time it occurred to him that he ought to go home. Thoughts of Touba had long since been chased from his mind, but he remembered him then, and thought he ought to go back to at least comfort Izuna. Asuna sighed and cast her eyes westward at the mention of home; her gaze fixed itself at the midway point of the adjacent mountain, and Madara wondered if that was where she lived.

That was the only point of the evening that Madara found himself feeling truly felt upset that he had been born into a ninja clan. It was not something that he got upset about often, since he wasn't the type to daydream about what-if realities, and it was rather odd that that of all things, this was what prompted such an out-of-character thought from him. If there was something that should have made him regret being a shinobi, he thought, surely it ought to have been the death of one's little brother. But no, it was the realization he couldn't invite her to come stay the night that made him wish that he had a "normal" family to bring a friend back to.

"I wonder if it'll rain," Asuna muttered, oblivious to Madara's turbulent thoughts, as she glanced up at the now-gray sky and pulled her hat up again. She went over to her pack and crouched there for a moment. Madara watched her back in silence as she began striking a small hunting knife against a piece of flint, holding it over a battered paper lantern.

She was a grimmer person when she stood up again, and the shadows cast on her face when she raised the lantern made her look as cheerful as a gaunt, sunless day.

"Thanks," she said pithily, without tears or dramatics. Still, wistful disappointment curled about her words like thick, ashy smoke. "Maybe we'll meet again."

"Wait," Madara said as she turned to leave. Asuna looked back quizzically.

"I know the way in the dark," she told him, misreading the urgency in his voice. "I walk a lot at night, too."

"No, that's not what I mean." Madara shook his head. "I mean… well, this river—I mean, it's not the first time I've come here. Just… so you know."

Something gratifying happened then—a smile bloomed on Asuna's face.

"I see," she said, a little more warmly now. "Then let's talk again if we ever meet here in the future."

They waved goodbye to each other over their shoulders and parted ways. Madara was scolded for staying out late, but he could tell his father's heart wasn't in it, and no punishment was forthcoming. Tajima was thinking about someone else that night.

The house felt emptier without Touba, and after Izuna fell asleep, Madara let himself leak a few tears into his pillow. He went to sleep with a heavy heart, and he woke up with one, too.

It was a while before he met Asuna again. Sometimes he wondered if he'd actually met her at all, because on the days he went back to the river and looked around, there was never any trace of her. He began to wonder if he'd only dreamed her up; after all, what would a lone girl like her be doing walking in the mountains by herself? What merchant would live in the middle of this range? The closest non-ninja settlement was days away.

But they did meet again, and that, Madara reflected, was the start of everything.

* * *

Despite the loss of Touba, life became suddenly enjoyable for Madara in the following months. He soon met Hashirama, and when Asuna finally appeared again, he introduced them; they became a trio, and hanging out with his newfound friends soon became the highlight of Madara's free time. In fact, Madara did not hesitate to label that period as the best part of his adolescent life. Before he met them, things had been fine, and afterwards, they had been more or less hell; but during the blissful days of their companionship, he had truly been happy.

Hashirama was like a godsend for all of the anger and pent-up emotion Madara had had to keep locked up in his chest. He was a shinobi, but he wanted to make a world where ninjas could talk like brothers, too—he wanted peace, not revenge. Their personalities differed, but they were matched in almost every other way: in physical ability, in intelligence, in experience, in position… he was both the perfect rival and the perfect friend. There was little Madara enjoyed more than sparring with him and discussing their plans for the future together.

Asuna loved to listen to them. Some days she would just sit under the trees and watch Madara and Hashirama go at it, whatever "it" was—spars, talk about ninja life, or dicussion of the village they wanted to build at the base of the great mountain that stood by the river. She never seemed to tire of it, even if it meant sitting silently for hours on end.

Both Hashirama's and Madara's home lives were taboo topics, since too many details might give away what clans they were from, but Madara often found himself wondering about what the story behind Asuna was. She was very well-educated for a peddler's daughter, being able to both read and write. She was even musically trained, which was such a high marker of culture that the ground-pounding shinobi boys, upon hearing that she could play the 25-stringed koto, felt the vague need to scale their take on her social class up by several intervals.

 _Maybe not a merchant's daughter, then_ , he thought.

"It's not a big deal," Asuna was amused to inform them. "Everyone in my family learned music at some point. You would have to put more effort into not learning if you wanted to avoid picking something up."

"Ehh. So the Momiji are musicians?" Hashirama asked, propping his head up with his fist.

Asuna was quiet for a little a while. Then she said, "Yes, mostly. Even the the ones who can't play instruments can at least sing."

Asuna, of course, could sing too—she never did if she knew they were listening to her, but they had caught her at it occasionally—so Madara was inclined to believe it.

"That's cool," he commented. "Hey, maybe you should play for us some time."

Asuna's face went from pleasant to dark in the space of a second. "I can't," she told him, with alarming bitterness. "My koto is broken."

"Oh." Madara and Hashirama exchanged glances, startled by her sudden change in mood. There was a long pause.

"I guess getting another one isn't…?" Madara trailed doubtfully.

"No. The grandpa who made our kotos died a while ago. And who could I buy one from around here?" Asuna sighed. "The only woodworkers who live in this area are the ones who make weapons for the ninjas."

Suddenly she was quite listless, and she began to longingly pluck at the string on her bow. It made a slight twanging sound, but it was only pitchless noise, and that seemed to depress Asuna even more.

Madara was a little taken aback. Even though she often had a sort of wistful, heavy-hearted air about her when they came across her alone, she had never been as disconsolate as this.

"I didn't know you liked playing so much." Hashirama scratched his the back of his head apologetically. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up."

"No, don't worry about it," Asuna sighed again. "We always did spend too much time with music. There were other things we should have focused on." She stopped plucking at her bow and regarded it morosely.

It was a yumi, unlike most of the bows the Uchiha clan used. It was elegantly crafted; its wood was shiny and polished and it had a maple leaf mon engraved below its grip.

"Are you good at archery?" Madara asked, wanting to the move the conversation away. He motioned to the bow. "You're always carrying it, but I've never seen you use it."

"I've never had to, except for the time I ran into a wild boar," Asuna replied. Then, fortuitously, a ghost of a smile returned to her lips. "It's funny you ask."

"Why?" Hashirama tilted his head. Asuna mimed picking up the yumi.

"You know the grip you make when you lift the bow?" She made an exaggerated motion with her hand. "Momiji kasane? It's our family namesake. We were all taught from the first moment we could play with toy bows."

"So you're not musicians, but archers?" Hashirama's eyebrows rose. Asuna fingered her hairpin with a frown.

"We were probably renowned for it at some point," she began with a complicated look on her face, "but by the time I was born, learning was more tradition than anything. What I learned was more kyudo than kyujutsu. Not many of us were good in a fight with it."

"Hey," Madara began, wondering why she had started speaking in past tense. Then he paused as the thought processed.

There was a shared blip of awareness between the three of them. Nothing else was said, but Hashirama's eyes suddenly lit with the same suspicion that Madara's did, and they both turned to regard her with half-formed realization. Asuna, not quite tensing, but still not at all at ease, looked at them both in return.

"Never mind." Madara jerked his gaze away. He suddenly found that, whatever tale was lurking here, he didn't want to hear it. Or, at least, he didn't want to make it so she had to tell it. Because even though she wasn't a ninja, and even though she couldn't spar with him and practice techniques with him like Hashirama could, Madara had often felt that Asuna had one thing about her in common with a shinobi: the look of having lost something. It was that same something that let her sit for hours and listen to them dream about peace.

She decided to go home nor long after that. Madara was left to watch her back retreat into the forest with Hashirama looking on at his side. They sat around and talked for a while after that, but soon after they went their separate ways, parting for opposite sides of the river.

* * *

Some time after that, Madara and Hashirama both came to the realization that Asuna was, on some level, ill. Not of health or mind; she was very fit, as would be expected of a girl who climbed mountains daily, and though she was often absorbed in her own thoughts, she was not irreconcilably disconnected with reality. Rather, she seemed to be ill of heart—of spirit, as it were. It became quite obvious once they bothered to look that Asuna was a person waiting to die.

Back then, it had been both disconcerting and hard to understand. Madara and Hashirama were no strangers to heartbreaking loss, but nothing had shattered their spirits to the extent of total self-apathy. However cruel and grueling the struggle was, they wanted to live with what things they had left.

(That had been before Izuna had died, so Madara had not understood to the extent that he did today. Back then, he mused, his picture of suffering had still been incomplete; he knew that apathy himself, now.)

But Asuna, though self-absorbed, was not obtuse. When they began to regard her warily, wondering if the next day might bring the thing that would break her, she gave them dry looks and made a point of stepping away from cliff edges.

"I'm not going to kill myself," she assured them with something that might have resembled humor. "I'm not impatient to go rushing to my end."

Madara was silent as they weaved through the trees, making their way back down toward the river. For a while, the only noise was the quiet mutterings of nature. Every now and then, the silence was punctuated by the sound of Asuna stepping on a twig, but the boys' footsteps were noiseless. After a spell, though, Hashirama lifted his head.

"What are going to do until then?" he asked her. "While you wait?"

Asuna hummed and glanced back at him, absently pulling at a loose thread on the frayed sleeve of her yukata. "I don't know," she said after a moment, with uncaring honesty. "I don't have anything planned. Nothing, I guess."

There was another beat of silence. Then Madara said, "You should come to our village."

The walking stopped, and his companions turned to stare at him. "Come to our village, when it's built," Madara repeated. "You'll probably have to wait until we get stronger, but when it's done, you should come and live with us."

"That's a good idea," Hashirama immediately agreed, turning to their friend with a wide smile forming on his lips. "You should, Asuna."

A spectrum of emotions flitted across Asuna's face. First there was detached interest, and then disbelief; then a flash of longing, a look of deep sorrow, and a long moment of a doubt. And then, after an almost eternal pause, something else. It was not quite a something that had a name, but Madara liked the look of it. It was a look he had never really seen Asuna wear before, but he liked it very much.

"Maybe," she said. "That could be nice."

* * *

The rest of the story, as far as Asuna was involved, came framed through the words of Senju Tobirama. Well, Hashirama knew a portion of it, and had shared it with Madara, but he had only been present for the very last of it.

The good times came to an end when Tajima confronted his son about his frequent goings-out. Madara was beaten black and blue for refusing to divulge what he had been doing, and the stalemate lasted several days before Izuna, who had been privy to a few details of Madara's meetings, confessed everything he knew to spare his brother any further thrashings. Madara, who was barely conscious for more than half that time, had had no idea about what was going on on the other side of the river.

That is, that in the time Madara had been holding out against his father, Senju Butsuma had killed Asuna.

Hashirama, who had been followed by and reported on by his own younger brother, had no way of concealing what had been going on. His father knew about both Madara and Asuna, and his mind immediately brought him to the only conclusion that any Warring States-era shinobi ever arrived at: spies.

Madara, of course, Butsuma had no intention of sparing. Tobirama, who had been along for the whole affair, knew that his father intended from the very start for the whole affair to end in Madara's death; after all, Madara had killed several Senju ninja, some of whom had been Butsuma's own companions. Asuna, though, Butsuma only decided to eliminate later on, after he had followed her and found out who exactly she was.

He set out with Tobirama to find her. Tobirama, with his sensing talent, picked up on her presence not far from the usual meeting place by the river. She often stopped by there during the week, just to check if her friends were about. From there, it was no great feat to follow her; she made a lot of noise as she walked. That would have been common sense in almost any other case, since being noisy was the best deterrent against the company of wild animals, but in the matter of being stalked by a veteran ninja and his sensor son, it was as good as tying one's own noose. And besides that, she had no idea she was being followed, and made no attempt to conceal her tracks.

The decision came when Butsuma and Tobirama finally followed her to her home, to the place midway up that neighboring mountain that Madara had seen her glance at the first time they parted ways. It had been hard to tell what exactly the place was a first, since the whole entire western half of it was nothing more than collection of charred, rotting wood and rubble, but the fortified walls roused Butsuma's suspicions well enough. And sure enough, when she arrived at the main house of the compound, he saw exactly what he had suspected he would see: the mon of a ninja clan.

Neither Madara nor Hashirama had recognized it when they saw it on her bow, for the was the crest of a very minor clan indeed. Butsuma himself was only familiar with it because he had participated in a turf war that had taken place on their land; the enemy had been the Hagoromo clan then. And, Butsuma recalled, it had been the Hagoromo that had decimated this little clan, preemptively striking before the Senju could sway them to their side.

Not that the Senju would have been able to do anything particularly impressive with them, except for perhaps an ambush. They had been mediocre shinobi at best; the only discipline any of them had had any regimen for was archery, and there had been only a handful of shinobi capable of hand-to-hand combat among them. Ninjutsu, as far as Butsuma had been able to tell, hadn't even been a field of study among them. Only a single man among them could use Earth style, and all the rest of the clan knew how to do with its chakra was basic tree-climbing and water-walking. They were really little more than a glorified civilian militia, wrapped up in the package of an extended family.

Butsuma, Tobirama recalled, hadn't thought there were any survivors of the rout, but it seemed a single little girl had managed to escape. Not that it mattered to his father that she was a little girl; plenty of his comrades had lost their lives to little girls on the battlefield, just as they had to any other ninjas.

His logic was easy to follow after that. Any survivor, he thought, would want revenge for a fallen family, and Hashirama was such a perfect opportunity to strike at the Senju that there was almost no doubt she intended to use him. The notion that she was colluding with the Uchiha boy immediately became a given in his mind, and he decided right then and there that she needed to be dealt with before she could meet up with him again.

So after only a few minutes of deliberation he went forth to confront her. It took a little while to search for her in the winding halls of the house, since it was not a place they were familiar with, but Tobirama located her easily enough.

They found her in a long, deteriorating hall, one not unlike the practice range where the Senju would train their throwing skills. There were a few dilapidated targets lined up at the far end of it, and the sole inhabitant of the room was turning to face them with alarm on her face.

She had changed from her deceptively civilian clothes into an uwagi and hakama, exactly the sort of training clothes the Senju used themselves. Her feet were bare and her hair and been tied back; she wore a chest guard to prevent any stings from the snap of the bowstring. The color of her hakama was a scarlet red, just like the ones of the few Momiji warriors Butsuma had encountered two years ago.

At the sight of them, her foot immediately began shifting back, and the arrow she had half-pulled from her quiver quickly found its way to the string.

"Momiji girl," Butsuma addressed her, crossing his arms. Tobirama saw her swallow heavily. "Do you know who we are?"

"Senju," she replied, voice barely carrying as her gaze flitted to the crest on the shoulder plate of Butsuma's armor. "You're Senju."

Butsuma nodded his son forward. Tobirama, oodachi in hand, stepped towards her.

"Don't come any closer." The girl had her arrow pointed in an instant, bow drawn and ready to fire. Her gaze flicked back to Butsuma, and a bead of sweat began gathering at her temple. "You're not welcome here. These are my grounds. Leave."

Her words might have been bold and commanding, but she shook as she said them. This girl, Tobirama could immediately tell, was not like him—this girl had never seen the battlefield. Quite possibly she had never even been in a fight; the fear on her face was plain to see, and soon she was trembling so hard that no one would have been surprised if she ended up shooting the floor instead.

"If you choose to fight us, that is your right," Butsuma pronounced in reply to her demand. No one had any delusions about how such a fight would end. "Even if the outcome is already decided, I will honor your wish. Tobirama."

Tobirama, as always, was stoic. "Yes, Father," he said.

"You will be her opponent. Kill her," Butsuma ordered.

Asuna was taking off through one of the open windows before Butsuma had finished speaking, dashing outside on bare feet. She was no good for fighting, but she was nimble, and as her pursued her, Tobirama could tell she had a good sense of balance. She disappeared into the trees outside like a shadow in the shade, and he was prompted to think that even the act of fleeing could be an art.

With chakra sense, though, it didn't take long to find her. Perhaps only a second or two. But in that short space, she had had the time to set up a shot, and Tobirama found himself diving to the side to dodge an arrow that would have hit him dead in the arm.

The chase lasted a whole four minutes, punctuated every few seconds by pauses and more dodged arrows. When it became clear that her pursuer couldn't be sniped, Asuna put her best into the run—and even if she had no talent for combat, she was an excellent runner. She knew every slant of the mountain by heart; perhaps if Tobirama had not had a sensing ability, she might have even gotten away. Eventually, though, he herded her toward a cliff, and then she was cornered.

In the heat of that final stretch, though, she slid from her sprint into a turn and wildly aimed a shot in the direction of Tobirama's lower body. Whether it was skill or luck, he wasn't sure, but the arrow lodged itself in his shin; he gasped and tried to make a clumsy roll as he fell, but he failed and collapsed flat on his front, blood spurting from his leg.

Breathing frantic, Asuna rapidly nocked another arrow and aimed for Tobirama's head. It was a sure-kill shot; no one could have missed a stationary target at that distance.

It was at that point that Hashirama arrived. When his father and brother had left the clan grounds for undisclosed reasons, the first thing he had thought to do was sneak away and warn Asuna that trouble might be coming. He had a general idea of where she lived, since she had mentioned more than once that her home was on the adjacent mountain, and he figured he could find her if he searched that area and got lucky. And he did find her eventually—he was just too late to do anything.

His arrival, though, did halt her mid-draw. In that moment, Hashirama and Asuna locked eyes, and Hashirama knew Asuna would never finish shooting that arrow. She had been there, after all, to hear him and Madara both vow to protect their little brothers no matter what, and there was no question in her mind about exactly who Tobirama was.

In the middle of that adrenaline-rushed pause, Asuna began to lower her arms. But she never did, because it was then that Butsuma appeared. He took in the scene before him and was across the grass in less than a blink of the eye; it took him half of a breath's time to raise his leg and kick her off the cliff.

Just for a moment, time stopped. Hashirama saw everything clearly. He saw the steely glint in his father's determined eyes; he saw Tobirama half-hunched in the grass, attention split between the scene before him and the agonizing pain of his leg; he saw Asuna's winded face, and how it had barely registered the fact that she was flying backwards.

" _ASUNA!_ " Hashirama yelled, sprinting forward for all he was worth. He stretched out a desperate hand as he reached the edge, and Asuna grabbed for it, horror just now beginning to unfold in her gaze. They missed each other by about a foot.

There was a valley below; the river that they had so often met at wove downhill through this area, and it had carved out the land. On their side, it was a sheer drop, and only a few hardy trees had sprouted well enough to jut out from the cliff face.

Asuna, who had never entertained the idea of dying a glorious, dignified death in battle, looked down at the fate awaiting her and let out the kind of shriek that only terrified young girls could let out. She screamed the whole way down, and if there was ever the sound of her plummeting into the ground, it was overpowered by the echo of her cry reverberating up the gorge.


	3. yesterday (chuuhen)

**Published: 5/31/2016**

* * *

昨日 (中編)

yesterday (chuuhen)

* * *

Despite everything, Hashirama never hated his father—not then, and not ever. Not even after he took away his best friend and then killed the other. It was strange, but it was also not, because when Hashirama looked deeply at himself, he could see his father. Had things gone another way, he knew he could have been just like Butsuma: made cruel by the cruelty of the times, clinging desperately to the ones who were left, lashing out with wild fury at anyone who approached.

Butsuma never told his sons his story, but still, Hashirama understood. He understood when he became the leader of the Senju and led men out to die, and he understood when he held his own children for the first time. But, perhaps more to the point, he had known one thing even back then, when he had still been a boy: even heartless men like Butsuma had things that were precious to them.

Hashirama didn't know if Asuna would have actually killed Tobirama, had he not appeared when he did. Even Asuna didn't know herself; when he asked her, she merely said, "Maybe. I didn't have many options." But Butsuma hadn't cared to give her the chance, and he had been more than ready to choose between her life and Tobirama's. For a man whose number of sons had, at the time, only recently been halved, it probably hadn't been much of a choice at all.

In the aftermath of the fight, Hashirama was sent out to scavenge the ruins of the Momiji compound for any usable medical supplies. Though Tobirama's injury wasn't fatal, it was not insignificant enough to be called trivial; that much was obvious just by looking. With the Senju clan's superior medical knowledge, it would be fine to move on by tomorrow evening, but until they returned to the compound first aid would be a critical concern.

"She was a worthier opponent than I expected," Butsuma murmured, examining his son's leg with a look of muted respect. "But you did well, Tobirama. Good job."

"Yes, Father," Tobirama said through gritted teeth. Even to him, the praise felt misplaced. He wasn't sure how any shinobi would feel proud after hearing a scream like that.

Hashirama, while he was investigating the abandoned compound, was able to learn much about the Momiji clan. Though the place was utterly empty of people, their remnants still lingered, even if they were obscured by layers of dust and decay.

It was immediately obvious why he never suspected Asuna came from a shinobi family: her family was hardly shinobi at all. The halls of the main house—the one that Tobirama and Butsuma had found her in—were nothing like the spartan halls of the Senju compound's. They were decorated with paintings and folding screens and vases of flowers—though the flowers, as expected, had long since wilted. The whole place was warmly decorated and crowded with all sorts of little trinkets and baubles. Almost everything seemed to be a product of the clan itself; all of the art and even the pottery was signed by people surnamed Momiji.

The Momiji clan, it seemed, had been full of fantastic artists. The paintings held both brilliant landscapes and scenes of daily life in their frames. Great mountain ranges and sunny forests were punctuated with snapshots of wet laundry drying on clotheslines, boys playing with wooden swords, and young people clustered together, singing and strumming on lutes. The folding screens told stories, too, of seasons changing, or of imagined lives. One of them depicted two children growing up, falling in love, and starting a family; another just down the hall started with an old man alone in his garden at dawn and ended with him wading into a river in the dead of night. Scrolls and poems and ink paintings hung on the walls of almost every room that he entered. Some of them looked amateurish, at least to Hashirama's untrained eye, but most of them didn't; they looked very skilled. It was evident that what energy a Senju would have put into training, a Momiji poured into the arts.

Artifacts of their lives were scattered everywhere, and Hashirama felt every inch like the trespasser he was as he rummaged around in search of supplies. He opened a box in one room and found several beautiful hair combs stored with gentle care; he opened a drawer and discovered a stash of secret letters hidden between stacks of socks; he opened a chest and beheld a rainbow of summer kimonos, yukatas just like the kind Asuna wore.

The attack must have occurred right after a meal. There were trays, tea cups, and empty lacquer dishes standing on various side tables throughout the entire house; one of the plates still had chopsticks laying across the bare skeleton of a fish on it. The accompanying bowl's bottom was coated with a hardened layer of leftover miso.

There was no infirmary in the main house; the compound's clinic, it seemed, laid elsewhere. Hashirama went from one end of the building to another and found an exit through an enormous hole in the wall; when he emerged, most of the buildings were crumbling in some shape or form. It was there that the charring and abandoned weapons appeared. There were a few shuriken lying about, and several arrows were still lodged in the ground and walls. When he went a little further in, Hashirama came across an enormous spray of dried blood staining the side of one of the houses.

He gave up his search when he went inside another half-annihilated building and found the first room he entered strewn with sheets of music and broken instruments. There were shinobues and biwas scattered on the floor; a single koto was sitting in the shattered remains of a wooden stand near the window, split into two splintered halves.

* * *

After that, Hashirama met with Madara again at the riverside. Butsuma tried to kill Izuna; Tajima tried to kill Tobirama. The older brothers intervened, and then they parted from there as enemies. Hashirama's heart felt raw with loss, and after everything was over and he was sitting back at home again, staring up at a moonless sky, he wondered how on earth he would tell Madara now how Asuna had died.

Madara didn't learn of it for a long time. It was only several months later, during a lull in a heated duel with his former best friend, that Hashirama managed to get out between panting breaths, "I need to tell you something."

"What?" Madara asked, similarly winded. His face was inscrutable to Hashirama's eyes, but he thought he detected a faint hint of anxiety in Madara's gaze.

"It's about Asuna," Hashirama muttered, suddenly finding himself unable to look anywhere but at the ground in front of his feet. "...She's dead."

" _What?_ " The moment of incredulity was brief, and the demand for an answer was quick in coming. Madara jerked forward. "What do you mean?!"

"My—Father, he…" Hashirama swallowed, and then steeled himself and looked up. "Father killed her. Because he thought she was a spy."

Hashirama never knew what went through Madara's head after that. He didn't know if Madara charged at him with a yell of fury because he blamed him, or just because he was angry and there was nothing else to be done. But they fought again and traded the most vicious blows they had to date, and both of them went home that day with matching gashes on their shoulders. It was almost poetic, Hashirama thought mirthlessly. Matching wounds for the matching tears in their hearts, inflicted on each other by each other. Asuna's death was just a twist of the knife.

Years passed like that, and though the fighting never ceased, time took the edge off the pain. Hashirama became absorbed in the matters of his clan. They fought with the Uchiha again, and then with the Hagoromo; there was a hapless skirmish with the Shimura, a tense standoff with the Sarutobi, and then battle again with the Uchiha. The previous generation began to grow older, and talk of a new clan head began; Hashirama was put forward as a candidate, and he was highly favored for the position. He was leader of the Senju before his twentieth birthday.

He didn't know what to make of it. Everything seemed to be changing all at once, but at the same time, nothing had changed at all. Clans were still fighting. Shinobi were still killing. Children were still dying.

What was the point of it all?

It was during that period, though, that two of the most marvelous events of his life occurred. One, he took a group of Senju shinobi down to the coast to meet with the Uzumaki, where he encountered Mito; two, he found Asuna while traveling there.

Halfway through their journey, Hashirama and his men stopped at an inn town along the Naka River. The people there held no love for shinobi; it was a town made up of survivors who had been displaced by the ninjas' endless fighting. But business was business, and they were not turned away. It being the first occasion of the whole trip they would not be camping, the shinobi celebrated by eating well and ordering numerous drinks. Hashirama sat up with them well into the night, and the innkeeper grudgingly bought out entertainment in the form of storytellers and music-makers.

After several rounds of drinking, a man began singing, and the sound of a koto dipped in from the background. The song it played was not a particularly sad one, but Hashirama found himself feeling melancholic anyway. He usually did when he heard the koto; it made him think of days long past, and of the experiences he'd never had the chance to have. Holding in a sigh, he had his neighbor pour him another drink and looked over at the performers.

Hashirama blinked a few times. Wondering if he was not drunk, he leaned forward with wide eyes, staring at the woman sitting at the Japanese harp. Her hair—her face, her profile—

It was her. She looked up in between notes, and their eyes met. Hashirama recognized the gaze of Momiji Asuna instantly; a shiver of nostalgia, a sensation of years-old familiarity, ran down his spine.

He spent the rest of the night staring at her with unconcealed intensity. When they noticed, his men began teasing him mercilessly, nudging him and whistling and laughing, but he couldn't bring himself to care. When the performances finally ended and she got up to leave, he stood up and went after her, heedless of their hooting. The inn's staff glared suspiciously at him as he passed.

She was waiting for him just outside. She had recognized him too, despite the changes the years had wrought. Asuna confessed later on that she had seen him and half-wondered if he wasn't someone else; perhaps a closely-related relative who bore him a close resemblance, or something similar. Even though she had recognized him almost immediately, she told him, she almost hadn't been able to reconcile the image of the skinny preteen boy with a bowl-cut to the charismatic, long-haired, muscled man drinking with his troop of Senju shinobi, sitting miraculously in her employer's inn. Added to that, his voice had become unrecognizably deep.

Asuna, on the other hand, had changed very little. Indeed, Hashirama thought, she looked like she had been frozen in time. Aside from a taller height, a slightly more filled-out figure, and a slimmer face, she looked largely the same as she had when they had been children. Her hair was just same, as was her style of dress; she was even wearing the exact same wooden hairpin she had always worn, those seven years ago. There was a faint line on the skin of her forehead, peeking out from under the very edge of her hair—a scar?—that he did not recall being there before, but that was one of the only differences he could find.

"Asuna?" he asked, very softly. The crickets were chirping, and a single cicada was wailing somewhere in the darkness. "Momiji Asuna?"

"Hashirama?" a quiet, disbelieving voice answered. Hashirama felt himself begin to tremble as he stepped forward. The moon, round and full, vanished behind the clouds before emerging again, casting pale light down onto the dirt road below. The figure standing before him lit up.

Hashirama found himself seizing Asuna's arm and pulling her into a bone-crushing hug. "Unbelievable," he breathed. "You're alive."

"How are you here?" Asuna asked into his chest, muffled voice filled with incomprehension. "How can you be… here?"

"How can _you_ be here, my friend?" Hashirama found himself laughing, relaxing his grip and holding her out at arm's length with his hands on her shoulders. He grinned so widely he thought his face might split, and tears sprung to his eyes. "I can't believe it. You fell to your death… and you're alive."

At that point, Asuna began to do something Hashirama had never seen her do: she began to cry. First, it was just a small sniffle—a hiccup—and then she was burying her face in her hands, sobbing.

"Hashirama," she gasped, and then repeated, "Hashirama. I…"

Hashirama began to cry too, but it was a laughing cry. The contagious kind, because after a minute, Asuna began to laugh too, as runny-nosed and tear-smeared as she was.

Asuna, Hashirama learned that evening, had survived her fall by dislocating her shoulder and breaking three ribs by falling on as many trees. She had grabbed onto one of the boughs sticking out from the cliff face, broken it, hit another one, and then gone careening through the canopy, colliding with a number branches. Her fall had ended in the deeper end of the Naka River. She was lucky, she said, to not have hit her head until she'd been swept downstream a ways. She would have drowned while unconscious otherwise.

As it was, she had been pulled out of the river a few miles north of this very inn town by a pair of fishermen, who had mistaken her for a corpse. The people here had been kind enough to care for her while she recovered, and then to give her work once she was well. Since then, she had been working at the inn, helping with the upkeep for her lodgings during the day and giving performances for pay at night.

"They're good people, even if they're cagey. I'm sorry for their hostility," Asuna apologized on their behalf. She twisted her fingers together as the moment of levity faded. "But they… they've lost a lot. And… they don't like being reminded of it."

Concern was plain on her face. Hashirama knew that look well. It was the look the Senju wives made when their husbands went out to war, when men long-separated from their brothers paced and waited for word of their siblings' safety, when children at home waited by the door for their parents, while their in the field anxiously waited to return home...

"I understand." Hashirama nodded. The destructive lifestyle of shinobi hurt everyone, the innocent most of all. A sober moment passed; then he looked at Asuna shrewdly.

"...No, they don't know about me," she muttered, having caught the meaning of his gaze. "They just assumed. That I was like them, I mean. And… well, I just never told them."

Just like you never told us, Hashirama mused. He didn't reply right away; instead, he put a hand on her forehead and swept back her hair.

It _was_ a scar.

"Am I a coward?" Asuna asked in a whisper as Hashirama let out a long, unhappy sigh. He and Madara had often admired Asuna's fair, unblemished skin together as children, privately and without her knowledge. She had been nothing like their clans' kunoichi, who were just as pockmarked and scar-ridden as the men were. Where they had had the reminders of conflict carved into their very beings, she had looked like peace. She had had the skin of a girl who didn't fight.

She never told anyone she was a ninja, and who could blame her? She didn't act like one; she didn't want to. She'd tried to live outside of her shinobi heritage. Most of the Momiji, Hashirama knew, had.

"I don't know," he murmured after a while, letting his arm drop. He was quiet for a long moment, considering. Then he said, "But I know I have been."

Asuna stared up at him as he stepped back and regarded her gravely.

"I've been running away," Hashirama told her, clenching his fists. "I realize that now. I've had the power to change things for a long time. I just didn't want to face the truth."

"What changed?" Asuna asked, uncomprehending but willing to take him at his word. Hashirama had always loved that about her, too. She believed in a way no shinobi ever could. He put his hands on her shoulders again and smiled.

He couldn't undo her scars, but perhaps he could undo them for all of the girls—for all of the boys, for all of the _children_ —yet to come.

"The truth faced me."

* * *

The next day started with screaming.

The shinobi were downstairs in a flash, where the innkeeper's wife was hurling baskets—both empty and filled—at someone outside the door.

"You little hussy!" she raved, hair flying free of its holder as she thrashed her arms. "You slut! You _whore!_ "

Hashirama went still as he saw who was outside, weathering the assault. Arms raised over her head, Asuna ducked and dodged and cried, "Obasan, it's a misunderstanding! A misunderstanding—"

"You were my daughter!" the woman shrieked back. "I made you my own! I let you take Miwa's place! How could you do this?!"

The hysterical woman screamed and yelled until she staggered; then her husband caught her, and she collapsed into his arms, sobbing. Red-faced, the innkeeper faced Asuna.

"After years at our table, enjoying our hospitality," he began stiffly, voice quivering with rage, "receiving our love, living together with us—you've betrayed us. With a ninja man. With a shinobi!"

"I didn't! I would never!" Asuna pleaded, hands clutched together. "It's not like that!"

"Do you think I'm deaf?" the innkeeper snarled. "Do you think I haven't heard these men nattering all night about you and him? Do you think we didn't _see_ you together outside, talking—" his face contorted with disgust— " _holding_ each other? I'm not stupid, girl!"

"Ojisan, let me explain," Asuna begged. "I should have told you—I know—but it's not—"

"What is there for you to tell me?" Setting his wife down, the innkeeper marched forward and shoved Asuna's shoulder. She staggered back like she was made of straw. "More lies? No. You will never have my trust again. Get out."

"Ojisan," Asuna whispered. Tears gathered in her eyes. "Ojisan, no. Please—"

"Don't call me that. Get out!" The innkeeper spat at her feet. "Never show your face here again."

Hashirama set his face like flint when the man turned and faced him. The Senju men shifted behind him.

"Shinobi, you are no longer welcome here," the innkeeper said. "Pay for your stay and leave us."

"Very well," Hashirama replied evenly. He wasted no time in drawing his money pouch from his belt; after he picked out the ryo owed, he dropped the coins on the counter beside him like stones, letting them clatter and spin and roll. "We gladly depart."

There was absolute silence as Hashirama motioned his men forward and strode past the innkeeper. They exited; the door slammed behind them.

"Asuna," Hashirama murmured to the woman still standing frozen on the road, staring blanking at the shut door before her. He touched her arm gently.

"It's our fault," Nisuke said, and his bowed with shame. "We spoke unnecessarily. We shouldn't have—"

"Peace, Nisuke." Hashirama held up a hand. "It's not your fault. It was a misunderstanding." He looked to Asuna again. "Wasn't it?"

"A misunderstanding," Asuna echoed. She lowered her head and stared at her feet, lip beginning to tremble. Then she put a hand over her mouth and turned her face away.

"Asuna…" Hashirama sighed.

The Senju shinobi looked on with stricken faces as she tried to muffle the sound of her crying with her hand. Finally, after what seemed like a small eternity, she turned back to Hashirama.

"I have no family left," she said, and her cracked like a heart breaking.

Hashirama, for a moment, was struck dumb. There was a desolate pause. But then determination welled up within him, and he put a hand on her shoulder again.

"No," he said.

A look of confusion formed on her face. "No…?"

"No. You do have family left. I am your family. _We_ are your family," Hashirama said firmly. He turned to his men. "Do you see your sister here?" he asked. "With my authority as head of the Senju, I make it so. Momiji Asuna is a daughter of this clan. You are to treat her as your own flesh and blood."

There was stunned silence. Hashirama's gaze hardened.

"She is your own blood. Swear it!"

The Senju shinobi straightened, shoulders snapping up. "We swear!" a chorus of voices cried.

"Good." Hashirama nodded, satisfied. He faced Asuna again.

"Hashirama, I…" she began, utterly baffled.

"Let me do at least this for you, old friend," Hashirama interrupted her. "You have suffered on account of the Senju enough. Let me make it right."

Though Hashirama had never been given the opportunity to study Asuna's crying face as a child, he found that now they were adults, he was learning quickly.


End file.
